Serengeti wildlife tells real stories, US government officials hide reality

A great story on Serengeti wildlife..Wildlife on Serengeti Migrate to Cleaner Water..
Part of the story reads "Each year a legion of nearly two million wildebeest, zebras and gazelles circulate through the park, settling in the verdant grasslands to give birth while the rivers flow and new wet season grasses grow in endless abundance. Then, as if spooked, the herds suddenly begin to trek north in late May or early June, leaving behind an apparent paradise. "When animals leave the south, there's still plenty of green forage," Ayron Strauch of Tufts University said. "And plenty of water." Strauch and Frances Chew, also of Tufts, now think they know what sparks the exodus: an invisible, rising tide of salts in the rivers from which the herds drink. Late in the wet season, the plains in the southern part of the park appear healthy and full of nutritious food, but the rain has already begun to slacken. When Strauch and Chew sampled water from the Mbalageti and Seronera rivers in the region, they found that concentrations of calcium, sodium and potassium salts soared to levels that could be dangerous to the animals' health."These nutrients are vital to life on the plains, to be sure," Strauch said. "But as base flow in the rivers decreases, concentrations of these nutrients skyrocket to hundreds of times what animals might encounter in the plants they eat." Strauch will present the research next month at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Studies of farm animals have shown that elevated salts in the water supply can cause cardiovascular disease and kidney failure in adults and cripple females' ability to lactate. New-born animals that drink tainted water can suffer from impaired bone and nerve development, and have trouble gaining weight. "Basically as soon as the water starts turning brackish, you start to see adverse effects," Strauch said. The same may hold true for Serengeti's wild herds. Strauch and Chew reason that the spike in salt content in the southern waters acts as a signal that its time to move north, before the harsh dry season sets in and food sources begin dwindling.However, John Fryxall of the University of Guelph in Canada said declining nutrients in grasses may drive migration, rather than water quality. "These animals need the green flush of nutrients in early growth-stage grasses," he said. Grasses growing late in the wet season are too long and full of woody material that animals can't digest..."

On the other hand, an equally engrossing report in the NYT titled "U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving." It states that "In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel. They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways. But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress. On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site. In interviews, the officials who withheld the research offered their fullest explanation to date. The former head of the highway safety agency said he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonizing members of Congress who had warned the agency to stick to its mission of gathering safety data but not to lobby states. Critics say that rationale and the failure of the Transportation Department, which oversees the highway agency, to more vigorously pursue distracted driving has cost lives and allowed to blossom a culture of behind-the-wheel multitasking. “We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety...."